Sunday, December 9, 2012

Here's an email I received recently and my response. I do get this question from time to time, so I thought I would post this in case there were any readers who might find it useful:

I'm a really big fan of yours! Your style is just so amazing, and I
love it. But, uh, I know this sounds dumb, you probably get a ton of
questions on this, but...To emulate the colouring style, and just the
basic outline of it all, how would I manage that? I'm assuming it's
digital, which is cool. But I really like the grainy textures and
smooth, vectorish looking figures. If you have any tips or anything,
that'd be wonderful! Thank you.

Hi, and thanks for the compliments!

You are correct, I create all
of my art digitally, and I use a Wacom tablet to create my drawings in
Photoshop. If you don't have a tablet, I highly recommend looking into
one if you are wanting to do digital illustration. You don't need a
fancy one; as the difference between using a mouse and using any tablet
whatsoever is like night and day.

Even though I do a lot of smooth "vectorish" line work, I always use
Photoshop rather than a vector program like Illustrator. The reason is
that I just find it more user friendly for my purposes. In Photoshop you
simply take the brush tool and draw whatever you want wherever you
want, like a real life painting. In illustrator I find that it is much
more about fidgeting around with lines to get them exactly right, which
personally I find a bit cumbersome when trying to make an organic
drawing.

As far as the different textures used in my work, it basically boils
down to different brushes in Photoshop. For smoother lines I use a
brush that emulates sort of a pencil line, so that it is smooth but
still has an uneven natural quality to it. but for more grainy or blurry
lines (like when I'm doing "shading") I use a brush that has sort of a
chalk look to it. I have created my own custom brushes after years of
whittling down what I like and use the most. Beyond that it's just lots
and lots of practice!